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The halfway point of the voyage came and went with no message from Anya, and her mother didn't worry.
They'd fought before she got on the ship. One would think that a hundred and ninety-one days would be more than enough time to bury the hatchet, or at least to get homesick enough to call one's poor mother and wish her a happy belated birthday. And New Year's, and Mother's Day, and... and, and, and. God forbid she prefer to speak to her only daughter more than twice a year. God forbid...
Someone should have noticed. The young man's parents, used to their boy being a bit scattered, assumed he simply forgot. The mechanic's wife carried on resenting a familiar distance. The captain and the copilot, who had no one to call during the brief delivery layover save for each other, went unremarked. And her baby girl...
She should have noticed.
The only sign of the Tulpar's disappearance was an angry email, sent by the jilted purchasers of several hundred tons of Dragonbreath mouthwash. It languished in the inbox of the now defunct Pony Express' marketing director for thirty days before it was automatically deleted.
The fight was a recurring one. "You're too stubborn," she'd told her daughter, aiming a scowl at the passenger seat without taking her eyes off the endless blur of the highway. "Like your father. Someday you're going to have to settle down in the real world, you know. This hauling business won't last."
"It's not supposed to last," Anya said, staring in turn out her window into the starless night. "It's just a stepping stone. I need money for med school."
"You've wasted plenty of it already."
"Mom..."
She sighed, changed lanes to go around an eighteen-wheeler. "I'm just being realistic. Dreams don't put food on the table, and I won't be around to pay half the rent forever. There's plenty of jobs out there you're actually qualified for."
"I don't want a factory job, mom."
Rolling her eyes despite herself, she switched back into the middle lane, her fingernails drumming on the steering wheel. "You could go back to that old folks' home. The pay was... doable."
Anya snorted. "Right, because getting paid barely minimum wage to change bed pans, insert catheters, and clean up dead bodies for fifty hours a week, all while getting spat on, that's a much better career path than a few years of freighter nursing."
"I know old people can be a bit cranky, Anya, but really—!"
"That's not a metaphor! An old lady literally spat on me!"
She couldn't help herself. Her rejoinder hitched into an incredulous giggle, and before long she had dissolved into hysterics, clutching the wheel in a white-knuckle grip. Her daughter was silent—but her shoulders were shaking, and she'd bitten her lip to catch a wry smile.
They could have left it there. That wouldn't have been a good memory to part on, but at least it wouldn't have been a bad one.
She should have just left it there.
Three hundred days into the voyage, she woke up in the dead of night. She wasn't sure why. She was bone tired, and normally a very good sleeper. But after an hour of tossing and turning, she gave up and padded into the kitchen of her small apartment—small, when her daughter wasn't sharing it with her, which made it tiny. Tiny and warm. Over the oven was the only window in the whole place that didn't look straight at a brick wall. She slid it open, pulling her robe tighter against the chill, and frowned up at the full moon.
It looked... off, somehow.
(Somewhere past that moon, past the edges of the solar system, several thousand AU into the depths of space, an empty pill bottle hit the floor with a hollow plastic clatter.)
A week before the Tulpar was due back on Earth, she looked for the email Pony Express should have sent about which docking bay she should pick Anya up from. It wasn't there, so she called the phone number on a post-it note on the fridge, and four automated answering machines later her exasperation had well and truly curdled.
"Hello! You've reached Paul at Easy Earl's Expedited Shipping, how may I help you?"
"Yes, this is—I'm—I'm sorry, did you just say Easy Earl?"
"Yes, ma'am!"
"I called Pony Express."
"I'm afraid you have the wrong number, ma'am."
"No, I don't. This is the number I always call." She checked her phone screen. "It's the right number. If this is some intern's sick idea of a joke—!"
An awkward pause.
"I'm sorry!" said the Easy Earl customer service representative. "I should have realized when you said Pony Express. We acquired them recently, their assets were all transferred over about eight months ago. Customer service numbers were re-routed for your convenience!"
She said some things she really shouldn't have, but Paul was kind enough not to hang up on her.
"Would you just tell me when the Tulpar is expected to dock? And where?"
The faint tapping of keys. "Tulpar, Tulpar... oh. Um, I'm not seeing any updates from the Tulpar."
"Was it delayed? They said we should expect it within the next two weeks. They're usually very reliable about arrival times, if nothing else." (And it really was nothing else.)
"Um... I'm sorry, this is kind of strange. Normally when ships dock for dropoff, their ETA gets updated in the system, but I'm not seeing any record of that. It could be a glitch from switching everything over, give me a moment please."
She gave him a moment.
Then two.
Then three.
"Thank you for waiting! It seems the Tulpar hasn't arrived at the dropoff yet, so its return shipments were canceled. Fortunately for you, you now qualify for Easy Earl's two-hundred day delivery guarantee! Can you tell me what you were hoping to pick up so that I can start on getting you a free replacement?"
She let out an involuntary bark of laughter, sharp and jagged.
She said, "My daughter."
Twenty years, they said. Twenty years of hope, if they were being sickeningly positive. Twenty years, realistically, before she would know for sure that her baby was dead.
It took two months for the story to disappear from the evening news. The world moved on to fresher tragedies, and a layer of dust settled over Anya's bedroom and the mystery of the Tulpar alike.
She was told that they had been unable to pinpoint exactly when the Tulpar had diverted from its course, because the emergency message that should have gone out to Pony Express had been lost in the shuffle of the acquisition. She was told this meant the search would have to cover tens of billions of miles. She was told, very gently, that the odds of recovering the ship within that lifesaving window were slim.
A corporate lawyer whose job was to persuade her not to sue informed her that Pony Express was, indeed, grossly negligent. Absolutely liable. And, of course, too bankrupt to pay out any damages. They gave her Anya's final paycheck with the air of a gracious gift.
The corporate lawyer hired by the young man's parents asked her to meet him at a cafe to discuss the case. He told her that Easy Earl's was responsible for all of Pony Express' assets, including the Tulpar, and had failed to preserve life-saving data. They hadn't even noticed it was missing for six months. He promised she would be able to retire on the settlement.
"It's good experience, isn't it?" she had said, the night of the argument, when she should have let it go. "The old folks' home. That's how this works, you start at the bottom and work your way up."
"I know," Anya snapped. "And the next rung is medical school. I won't get anywhere if I just... stay in place."
"I don't understand why you're so set on this. You gave it a shot. Eight of them, no less! We all have to settle for something eventually, Anya, and if you can't accept not getting the exact job you want—"
"I can do it, mom!"
A pregnant pause squatted between them, sucking up all the air in the car.
Anya's voice softened. "One more try, and I swear I can do it. I just need money, and time to study, and this job gives me both. It doesn't have to be perfect. As long as I get in somewhere, then I'll be past this wall. I'll work hard. I'll put in the hours. I'll get my license, and... and maybe someday I could afford a bigger apartment for us. I want..." And she finally looked away from the window, her eyes shiny with unshed tears, lips trembling with the effort of trying to smile. "I want to help you retire."
She kept dreaming about that moment, over and over. Every night, she tried to tell her, "You did it. I hate it more than anything, but you did it."
Every night, she heard herself say, "I don't need to retire in twenty years. I'd rather have my daughter working a stable job in the here and now."
Anya stopped talking for a while, after that.
There were a lot of ways she could have sent her off, twenty minutes later, leaning over one of those stupid rope fences in the docking bay. "I love you," maybe, or, "I'm proud of you," or even, "I know you can do it."
She sent her off with, "At least think about what I said."
And worse than chilly silence—worse than a screaming match—worse than any expression she possibly could have seen, the last time she looked at her daughter's face—there was only a soft, quiet heartbreak.
"Yeah," Anya whispered. "Yeah, okay. I'll think about it."
Nineteen years, eleven months, and fourteen days after the Tulpar took her daughter away, she was awoken in the dead of night by a miracle.
The ship's black box, still stubbornly relaying its distress call, picked up by sheer dumb luck by an automated freighter. A frantic scramble to prepare a rescue vessel—because the freighter, unmanned as it was, had no oxygen on board and couldn't respond to the distress call itself. Then the waiting, and the wondering.
They said that based on the Tulpar's current position, the crash had likely occurred about five months into the voyage. They said that the outcome would depend on how long the crew had managed to survive before taking shelter in the cryostasis pods. The timeline was cutting it a bit close, but not hopelessly so. As long as they'd stayed calm and rationed their food appropriately, the crew should have more than enough time.
Ninety-five percent. That was the number they gave her. A ninety-five percent chance that they would bring her baby home.
The young man's family invited her to a party, to celebrate the good news. They'd never given up, not in all this time—he wouldn't have, they'd said, so we won't.
She didn't go. But something living stirred in her, just a little, just enough that she changed the sheets on Anya's bed and dusted off her bookshelves. She hadn't touched any of her things in all that time. Had hardly even been able to open the door. Now she sat on the striped comforter, still warm from the dryer, smelling of floral detergent and fabric softener. Stayed there for hours, breathing in the scent of hope as she cried.
The first missive arrived just shy of four months later. Short and sweet: Tulpar found. Long-range scans indicate emergency power for cryostasis pods still intact.
That party, she did go to. She talked to the young man's mother in the doorway of a comically overstuffed pantry. And then, when she woke up the next morning, she went out and bought the exact brand of boxed pancake mix Anya had loved the most when she was seven.
They'd feed her once they thawed her. After months of survival rations, stretching food and oxygen as far as they could go? Anything would taste good, even food that realistically wouldn't be much of an improvement from the slop Pony Express had stocked on the Tulpar, but it still seemed like adding insult to injury. So she'd feast her when she got home. Spoil her downright rotten. And then...
Then, to hell with one more try. She'd throw settlement money at tests and textbooks and classes and tutors for as long as it took. There'd be plenty more trucks to pass, driving her off to the school of her dreams. Kinder conversation between the changing of lanes.
The books she'd ordered arrived. (She'd paid for next-day shipping, which was patently ridiculous.) Who knew how much the tests had changed in twenty years? Anya would probably need all new ones. She stacked them neatly on her shelves—not wrapped, like a gift, but just tucked between horror novels and box sets of terrible old TV shows. Just waiting for her, like they'd always belonged there.
Her fingertips lingered on their bright glossy spines. Then she got a phone call, and retreated to the kitchen to answer it.
Apparently someone had remembered that there'd been five crew members aboard the Tulpar. Then, with the rescue ship already months deep into space, somebody else had thought to check if the ship had been retrofitted with an additional cryopod. Some indeterminate time later, a third person had finally plucked up the courage to admit to the families that it hadn't. Hence the phone call.
Anya would've been better with the math. Her mother had to look it up online, and put it through a calculator. Ninety-five percent, times eighty percent, is seventy-six percent. They could put that on one of those tests Anya kept having to retake. Practical statistics. Field multiplication. Perhaps in the form of a word problem.
(Of course, that assumed someone would be left behind at random. Would the captain go down with his ship? Would the oldest crewmate cede his survival to one of the others? Would the poor young man be punished for the negligence of his belated addition?
Or would Anya do what she had always wanted to make a career of, and save a life?)
The next missive arrived to a miasma of suffocating dread. There was no invitation, this time—and she couldn't blame any of the others for not wanting to look each other in the eyes, knowing they were all hoping with everything they had that the unlucky name wasn't theirs.
Except that there wasn't one unlucky name.
Tulpar boarded. Four dead. Survivor in cryostasis, injuries critical. Transporting in-stasis. Please prepare trauma team for extensive third degree burns, quadruple amputation, and possible infection.
Then a guilty addendum: We know we're risking brain damage with the extended stasis, but we don't have enough morphine for the flight back. It wouldn't be humane to thaw.
A ninety-five percent chance of Anya returning unscathed. A seventy-six percent chance of seeing her daughter again, while some other family had to grieve. One chance in five of her little girl coming home in agony. Twenty minutes later, and she didn't even have that.
Bodies identified. Survivor is Captain Curly.
She retreated into Anya's room. Sat on the newly washed comforter, whisper-soft beneath her fingers, and thought of that word. Bodies. All this time, knowing deep down that her daughter was gone. Wishing for the closure a body could bring. Finally getting it, bundled with one tiny glimmer of sunlight, just enough to thaw her. And as for the poor doomed captain of the Tulpar, that warmth was not a kindness.
She fell asleep on top of the covers, breathing in the stench of false hope, her arms wrapped around a pillow that hadn't touched a living cheek in twenty years.
She thought—naively, stupidly—that the body meant it was over. Even if she would never have her daughter back, at least the matter was closed. At least it couldn't get any worse.
(Another laughing fit, in the bathroom of a morgue. Involuntary. Hysterical. She found herself sitting on a dingy tile floor, head spinning from lack of oxygen, still wheezing.)
The police beat her to the coroner. She had to wait for hours, rocking back and forth in a plastic folding chair, suffocating in silence with the other families. Some poor intern was relegated to informing them that there had been autopsies. Foul play was suspected. Sabotage. Murder. And—
And a fifth body, eleven and a half inches long.
They called the families in, one by one. She was last. Some part of her knew why.
For the only one on that ship whose death hadn't been violent, Anya's corpse was a horror. Twenty years trying to rot in a closed system with little moisture or oxygen had left her a sunken, shriveled thing, skin stretched like rawhide over bone. It didn't feel like looking at her little girl. Just a Halloween prop that happened to be shaped like her.
She said it anyway—"Yes, that's her." Because it was what they said on TV, and who else could it be? The only daughter on that ship was hers.
The coroner cleared his throat. Rubbed gloved hands together, latex making a soft rasping sound. "We've ruled her death a suicide. She kept detailed notes on the inventory in medical. Wrote, uh. Wrote the dosage down. Which some of my colleagues thought was suspicious, but the handwriting matches. We think there was fighting over the working cryopod, and she... didn't join in."
"No," she found herself saying, nodding her head. "No, she wouldn't. She wanted to be a doctor. First, do no harm."
"Yeah..." He blew out a long breath, and went back to wringing his hands. "I don't know how much I'm supposed to tell you, but... I've been doing this job for thirty years. This is the first case in twenty-nine of those years to make me lose my lunch. I know it's cold comfort, but your girl knew what she was doing. Spared herself the worst of it. Knew exactly how much to take, to get the job done... as painlessly as possible. Can't say it didn't hurt at all, but she would've been pretty out of it for that part. Wouldn't, uh. Wouldn't have suffered."
She thought about those words, when she left that meat locker and its cold blue lights behind, and was taken to speak with two detectives in a jarringly beige conference room. When she told them that yes, she wanted to see the photographs.
A grieving mother ought to cry. She couldn't figure out why she kept laughing instead, except... except that it was funny. It was downright hilarious that anyone could look at a mummified corpse that had been propped up, dressed in a party hat, and served a plateful of human meat—could cut into that corpse and find fetal bones—and then say with sincere optimism that she probably hadn't suffered.
The captain's injuries were blamed on the crash itself, save for that one particular cut. The copilot was also ruled a suicide. The young man and his mentor, both murders. One had been struck with an axe, either before or after attempting to crawl into a broken ventilation shaft to hide, and the other shot twice. What a terrible, sordid shame, that ordinary men had devolved into such violence for the lure of their singular life raft. Perhaps if Anya hadn't taken those pills, there could have been an agreement to save the baby.
Nobody knew precisely who had done what, but the only one alive to face justice was also the only one who physically couldn't have been responsible. The police decided that probably either the copilot or the young man had shot the mechanic, and either the mechanic or the copilot had attacked him with the axe, as either provocation or retaliation. From there the details didn't matter. What was there to be gained in placing blame now, with everyone involved twenty years dead, for crimes committed out of desperation? Better to focus on what little hope could be gleaned from such a dark story.
The copilot had been the last man standing. Starving, suffocating, driven to madness by the horrors he had seen, he had still found the strength for one final, defiant act of humanity. He had saved his longtime friend instead of himself.
The tragedy of the Tulpar was an accident. A horrific accident, but no one's fault, unless you counted the fault passed from Pony Express to the now-equally-defunct Easy Earl's. Which the courts, they made sure to tell her, would not. Nothing to be done about any of it but be glad that these sorts of journeys were no longer manned.
"Bullshit."
"...Excuse me?" said the detective, blinking at her as though she were a shockingly potty-mouthed nursery schooler, and not a grown woman a stone's throw from turning eighty.
"I said, bullshit. My daughter didn't want children. She certainly wouldn't want to give birth on a space freighter."
His partner cleared his throat awkwardly. "Well, uh... it's, we can assume it was probably... an accident."
"My daughter," she said, slowly and pointedly, "was a nurse. She knew exactly how dangerous that situation was, and exactly how to avoid it."
"Be that as it may," the first detective said, now betraying a hint of exasperation, "she was pregnant."
"I'm not saying she wasn't."
"Then what are you saying?"
"I'm saying there was another crime on that ship. A crime that predates the others by, oh, about six months."
She had to fight tooth and nail to make them run the DNA test.
Pregnancies, she was told with cloying patience, sometimes happened on deep-space voyages. Especially on ships like the Tulpar, where prevention was mostly abstinence-focused. (Cheaper to treat their adult crew like teens at a bible camp, than to provide her daughter with anything that might have actually helped her.) The isolation, the close quarters, the sheer boredom of it all, meant that many people made... uncharacteristic relationship choices.
This was probably a reference to a phenomenon Anya had mentioned once, the number of loudly heterosexual men who slept with each other on those voyages. The very same reason why Anya always smuggled a pack of condoms on board with her luggage, just in case, because she wanted to be the sort of nurse who could slip them to someone in need with a wink and a non-judgmental smile. The investigation found that package, unopened in the back of a cabinet. "See?" they had the nerve to tell her. "She obviously intended—"
She told them Anya had known since she was twelve years old that she'd nearly killed her own mother on her way into this world. Had traced the scar—not the horizontal sort, with neat and precise edges, but a jagged vertical one. Had nodded gravely when her mother gave her a foil-wrapped package to practice with and told her, "Just don't do anything stupid."
Why would that girl, who had grown into a woman who wanted so desperately to go to medical school next fall, who took inventories of her supplies every day for five months knowing full-well how unlikely it was that anybody would ever read them, who wrote down the details of her own overdose for posterity—why would she possibly bring lifesaving protection onto that ship and then just not use it?
"Look," one detective sighed. "I understand this is hard. It's natural to want somebody to blame, but the fact of the matter is that everyone on that crew is either dead, or may as well be. Say you do get the test done. What will that change? Why cast a shadow of suspicion on a man who can't even defend himself, on behalf of a woman who can't tell us what she may or may not have wanted? Even if it is the captain, I'm sorry ma'am, but he's probably never going to wake up from that coma. There is no bad guy in all this. Just a bunch of desperate people, who made desperate decisions to try to survive, and didn't."
"...Do you have children, detective?"
"Yeah. Two boys and a girl."
"Are you telling me you would forgive and forget, just because the man was dead, if you knew someone had raped your daughter?"
Always worth a try, with fathers. She hated him far more for the fact that it worked.
The next morning found her sitting at her kitchen table, a crumpled letter in one hand and her tablet in the other, staring blankly into the hollow eyes of the Tulpar's copilot.
No amount of arguing, of screaming, of tears, had convinced anybody to do anything about it. Not when his brains were already spattered all over the cold metal walls of the Tulpar, the story of his heroic sacrifice splattered all over the news. Not when Anya was voiceless—had written nothing down, the only sign of when it had happened the size of the corpse nestled inside hers like a matryoshka doll. And why not? If it was really a crime, why not report it to corporate? Why carry on doing his psych evaluations for weeks afterward, in just the same untidy hand, without making a single note of it? Why not fight harder?
"Fear," she'd said. One tight, choked word. It must have been constant, immense, all-consuming. Their living quarters were so cramped. Anya had laughed about it, freshly returned from her maiden voyage, twirling around with her arms thrown wide and breathing in city exhaust fumes like they were the sweetest sea breeze.
That whole day, she couldn't keep still. She bounced on her heels as she complained about living packed like sardines, always tripping over the same three people whenever she left her room, one of them walking in on her by accident because the doors all looked the same and none of them locked. Eventually she took to running circles around her mother, darting in to answer a question and then tearing off with a joyful whoop. Because that was the worst part, she'd said. Having nowhere to run.
Of course she'd kept quiet about it. Of course she'd taken care not to leave any evidence for that monster to find, any sign that she might talk once the voyage was over. Of course she'd pretended like he'd done nothing wrong.
She sat heavily on Anya's striped comforter, sobbing uncontrollably into her hands. Why, they kept asking her. Why, why, why would you even want to know? As if this hadn't been the most precious thing left aboard the Tulpar—not an unrecognizable body, not closure, but this. Proof that Anya had held her terrified silence for six long months, even after her hope of escape must have dwindled to the barest sliver.
She could have taken those pills the night it happened. She could have taken them the day of the crash, and spared herself most of that hell. She would have, if sparing had been the point. Despite what he did to her, despite how hurt and scared and trapped she must have felt, despite everything...
Here was proof that her daughter had wanted to live.
As with most things, the detective was wrong about Captain Curly. His survival of the initial impact was unlikely, his survival of the months that followed absurd, his waking from the medically induced coma a naked miracle. The doctors were incredulous.
She found that she wasn't surprised. There was no way on Earth or beyond it that he would have made it this far, save for sheer bloody-minded spite. His own refusal to die. Her daughter's refusal to let him. The two stubbornest people in all the universe, working together. Of course he woke up.
She was the only one who went to see him. His doctors seemed reluctant to let her—maybe they'd heard about her shouting match with the former CEO of Pony Express. Maybe it was just that he didn't know her.
Shouldn't have known her.
Then she stepped into his hospital room, and a wild blue eye fixed on hers, and he began to choke and thrash and seize... and all she could think was, oh. I must look more like her than I thought.
His nurse tried to throw her out. But he recovered in time to jerk what was left of his leg—pointed, repetitive motion—towards something on the other side of his bed that she couldn't see.
The nurse made a face. "Are you sure...?"
Jerk. Jerk. Jerk.
She sighed, and retrieved a large poster-board of the alphabet. Held it, somewhat impatiently, at Captain Curly's bedside. He began to tap out letters with the stump of his right arm, in time with his labored breathing. His coordination was poor—she wondered if that was from the initial accident, or if he had suffered cryostasis complications after all. It took almost a minute for him to spell out just four letters.
A-N-Y-A
"Yes. I'm her mother."
He didn't cry. It was unnerving that he didn't—even as he convulsed again, a tortured whimper slipping between clenched teeth, his eye remained dry. Piercing. Fixed.
There was a chair at his bedside. She took it, so that he'd have to twist his head at an excruciating angle to look at her. So that he wouldn't, couldn't, look at her. So that she wouldn't have to look into that ever-staring eye, and glimpse the horrors it had reflected. Rank cowardice, to be so afraid of a man who was clearly sobbing, not unwilling but unable to shed a tear. The explosion that had burned his tongue out of his mouth and seared away his eyelid must also have cauterized his tear ducts.
It took several more minutes for Curly to recover his breath. Twice, the nurse started to wander off, and she had to tell her to wait. Then...
Tap. Tap... Tap-tap... Tap.
S-O-R-R-Y
She breathed out, hard, into the palms of her hands. Everyone was fucking sorry.
"She really looked up to you. Did you know that?"
On one side of the board, there was a green circle and a red triangle, labeled yes and no. He tapped,
YES
"She trusted you."
More soft, pained sounds. A tap.
YES
"Did she tell you what he did?"
A long pause. Not a silence, but a period of Curly struggling to communicate—his arm going haywire, frustrated snarls, the nurse droning unhelpfully through a breathing exercise. Then, finally,
YES
She hadn't needed to ask. Didn't need to ask the next question, either. The fatal question. Maybe it was cruel of her, to do it anyway.
Maybe it was just that, out of the crowd of people she'd shouted responsibility at like screaming prayers at a brick wall, he was the only one who couldn't walk away. Who had no choice but to listen.
"And? What did you do about it?"
She heard, then, what he must have sounded like on the Tulpar. Breathless moans of abject, helpless agony. She saw a figment of Anya, leaning over this man with nothing but a roll of gauze and a dwindling supply of insufficient painkillers, while this sound echoed off those cold and uncaring walls. The blur of tears meant that she missed it, at first. Had to blink them away to understand his frantic tapping.
NO
NO
NO-NO-NO-NO-NO
Nothing.
"Well," she said thickly. "At least somebody's honest for once." She stood up, raising a trembling hand to stem the flow of tears, and took a step towards the door—
Captain Curly shook and wheezed, tapping desperately at the letter W.
"He means wait," said the nurse.
She had to wait a long time. His distress obviously worsened the disorder of his movements, and several times he hit the wrong letter and had to tap NO-NO-NO for her to strike it out.
T... E...
The sobbing never stopped. She could see his chest heaving beneath his papery blue hospital gown.
S... T...
He was trembling with exhaustion. Not just emotional but physical, pushing his body to its absolute limit for the sake of a single word. If he could still sweat, he would be soaked with it.
I... F...
Her breath caught. She put a hand over her mouth, knowing the last letter even as he forced himself, with the final heaving strength of a marathon runner collapsing over the finish line, to tap it out.
T-E-S-T-I-F-Y
She had known. It had taken time to put the dread into words, to speak it aloud to friends and reporters and apathetic detectives... but she had known from the moment they told her about those tiny bones they'd found lodged in her daughter's abdomen. She'd known... but she wasn't there. She couldn't make anyone believe her.
Slowly, she stepped around the foot of his bed, back into his field of view. "May we have a moment?" she asked the nurse. "I'll hold the board for him."
"I'm sorry, but you're not family—"
Taptaptap.
YES-YES-YES
The nurse frowned. For a moment it looked as though she was going to ignore him, but then she glanced at her watch and sighed. "Okay, but if you need me—"
He pressed a button built into his bed with his left stump. It made a buzzer sound, just like the one on jeopardy, and she made brief eye-contact with Curly—an instant of possibly-imagined, possibly-shared amusement, at the sheer godforsaken absurdity of it all.
The nurse threw her hands up in defeat, and left the room.
She held the board. She stood, silently, and Captain Curly lay in his bed, exhausted by his frantic plea. And it was that, a plea. She wasn't sure how she knew, exactly, with no voice to carry tone. Maybe the desperation in his movements was enough to see it for what it was. Not offering, reluctantly... but begging.
Maybe it was just that she understood the feeling.
"We fought, you know," she murmured, resting her chin on top of the poster-board. "The night she left. She wanted to keep shooting off into space to pay for medical school, I wanted her to pick a more realistic dream and stay home."
Curly breathed. A little slower now, a little easier, as if lulled by the sound of her voice. She hoped he found it familiar.
"I still remember the look on her face. The last time I saw her, I... she was so crushed. And no wonder, when it took thinking she was dead for two decades before I tried to support her. Like—like I thought I could buy her books now, and somehow that would make up for all those years—" She made a noise, somewhere in the back of her throat. "And then I didn't even get to do that."
They made a noise, the two of them, together.
"It's easier to be angry. At you, at everyone. Easier than facing how much she must have hated me."
Captain Curly stirred. It was harder to see what letters he was tapping, at this angle. She bent forward to look.
NO
Crime scene photographs flashed behind her eyelids. The empty pill bottles, abandoned on the floor of medical, beside the stained cot. The trail of blood on the floor—someone else's, but smeared oddly, as though another body had been dragged through it. That unblinking eye.
He'd been with her, at the end. He'd seen everything. He'd heard...
More tapping. Slower now, not frantic but dogged. Purposeful.
M-I-S-S-E-D-U
S-O-R-R-Y
She had to put the board down, after that, and sit in the chair, and sob. The captain didn't seem to mind. Didn't even seem to notice. Only lay there, so silent and still, his glassy eye staring blankly into nothing...
Her heart lurched. She shot to her feet, hand flying to her mouth—and noticed the steady rise and fall of his chest.
Only asleep. Only exhausted by the effort, of doing absolutely everything in his power.
"Thank you," she whispered. "It's... it's something."